Bus drivers did ‘the right thing’ after bombings

Friday

Apr 19, 2013 at 6:00 AM

By Donna Boynton TELEGRAM & GAZETTE STAFF

A team of local school bus drivers who are usually tasked with shuttling injured runners from medical checkpoints to a triage center at the Boston Marathon finish line found themselves in the midst of chaos Monday.

The eight school bus drivers work for AA Transportation Co. Inc., which is contracted to provide the medical buses for the Boston Marathon.

Blanca Lugo, Todd Williams, Hector Vazquez, Jose Blanco and Edward N. Bourgault, all of Worcester; Michael Ciesluk of Oxford; Robert Amadei of Douglas; and William Hogan of Barre, started their days either shuttling runners from the finish line where they parked their cars before dawn to Hopkinton to start the race, or were stationed at one of five medical tents along the 26.2-mile route to assist runners who could not complete the race.

Each bus driver was accompanied by an EMT and a ham radio operator.

After the explosions, the drivers were placed on standby, some with nervous and scared passengers on board, with a few selected later to drive into the scene of blasts.

“I can’t believe how well they held together, “said Julie D’Ambra, director of driver development and safety, of the combined effort of medical, public safety personnel and ordinary citizens such as his school bus drivers. “They had no disaster training, there was no coordination, there was no one to answer to, they were just tying to get these people back to safety.”

Mr. Williams was close enough to hear the explosions. The EMT assigned to his bus jumped off and ran to the scene. His instinct was to jump out to, but he could not leave the injured runners from the race on his bus.

Mr. Amadei is overcome with emotion when he talks about the events of the day, which included passing his cellphone around to injured runners so they could contact family and friends, giving directions to families from out of town to collect their runners.

When Mr. Hogan heard of the explosions, he instantly thought of his son, a Northeastern University student who was with classmates collecting recyclables from trash cans near the finish line.

“I had to do my job, but when I heard the bomb was in a trash can, all I could think of was my son,” said Mr. Hogan, who later got a text from his son saying he was safe. He was able to talk to him by phone later that evening.

Mr. Blanco didn’t think he did anything special that day, until AA Transportation received a call from a runner to thank him.

“I didn’t know what I did,” Mr. Blanco said. “I hugged this girl because she was sad and she asked me to hug her. I didn’t know how important that was for her.”

Ms. Lugo, whose bus was positioned at St. Ignatius Church on the Boston College campus, was later ordered by the state police to follow them to the finish line. Ms. Lugo had reunited some of the injured runners on her bus with their anxious families — some even with their pets — and said people were stepping in front of the buses looking for transportation out of the city after the explosions.

When they were allowed through the barriers, they saw a scene of armed police officers and National Guardsmen.

Her co-worker, Mr. Vazquez, led the line of buses through the barricade.

“Going up that street, it looked like a movie, with all the police, FBI, but this was happening for real” Mr. Vazquez said. “People were scared, people were crying. It was kind of like a dream. Hopefully this is something we will never have to go through again.”

“Firefighters and first responders train for this,’ Mr. Ernenwein said. “It’s not that these are ordinary people — in my opinion, they are spectacular people, but there was no training for them. This was just instinct to step up and do the right thing. A lesser person would have taken a left to get on the Mass Pike and headed home.”

Contact Donna Boynton at dboynton@telegram.com.Follow her on Twitter @DonnaBoyntonTG

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